DELETE Hasten, SLIGHTLY ALTER all enemies, SLIGHTY ALTER all player powers

[Vanden]

Hasten is not mandatory, it's just popular. This isn't a situation like Fitness where if you didn't take Stamina, you literally had a time limit on how long you could play your character because you would run out of endurance. Stamina also required three power picks and was a large burden on builds. Hasten requires one pick.

 

To people saying Hasten feels mandatory... how much have you really tried playing without it? I have 8 level 50 characters and only 3 of them took Hasten. I don't miss it on the ones that lack it.

[Heraclea]

FWIW, I have many high level characters that never took Hasten.  Heraclea doesn't; it doesn't do enough for Dull Pain to justify it, she doesn't need Dull Pain often enough to want it, and she took most of her secondary attacks so it does little for her attack chain. 

 

It does benefit scrappers, brutes, blasters, and other DPS characters significantly enough that it may be worth taking there.  I don't unless I know that endurance is already a solved problem on the character.  The blaster sustain abilities probably made it much more attractive to the class. 

 

Let's see no more nerf-herding.  Please.   Bad enough that I'm preparing myself mentally for stripping, replacing, and retiring my first level 50 scrapper, because I apparently Chose Poorly when I rolled Titan Weapons.

[TheAdjustor]

1 minute ago, Demon Shell said:

I had thought for years, long before the selection metrics were ever posted, that Hasten should just be an inherent. And why not? The level of Recharge Reduction on your abilities is one of the things that makes this game different than other MMOs.

 

Most of the time in MMOs if a move has a 10 minute cooldown, there's little to nothing you can do about it. Here, there's on average between 100% (Recharge to ED, no Global no Hasten) to 300% (Recharge to ED, 130% Global, Perma Hasten) more that you can do about it.

 

Recharge in this game should be celebrated for what it is, one of the things that makes this game different, not nerfed. Hasten, as the single largest source of Recharge, should be given freely to everyone.

 

My only question is, if you make Hasten inherent, what do you replace it with?

This is a far superior way of looking at this. If I wanted to play Aion, Warcraft or Neverwinter I would. This game offers the most incredible sandbox for building your character I have ever seen in any game, it's where so much of the charm is

[Replacement]

I like the idea of something stomping on Permadom, so the class would actually get looked at and buffed in meaningful ways.

 

I truly believe Dominator would be a better AT by now if it didn't have permadom builds dragging the average up to "acceptable AT performance."  No other AT has this level of "you're expected to underperform until you properly invest in set bonuses, procs, and burn a pool selection."

[Infinitum]

6 minutes ago, Vanden said:

Hasten is not mandatory, it's just popular. This isn't a situation like Fitness where if you didn't take Stamina, you literally had a time limit on how long you could play your character because you would run out of endurance. Stamina also required three power picks and was a large burden on builds. Hasten requires one pick.

 

To people saying Hasten feels mandatory... how much have you really tried playing without it? I have 8 level 50 characters and only 3 of them took Hasten. I don't miss it on the ones that lack it.

I agree, to me it's more like a safety blanket I grew accustomed to, you HAD to take stamina though, otherwise it wasn't fun.  I probably could do without it on most of mine, but I don't want to because it's a soft warm blanket.  lol

[William Valence]

Hasten may be a Min/Max tax, but I don't think that's inherently a bad thing.

 

I do think it would be a bad thing to give inherent quickness to everyone with no power or opportunity cost. It would probably be best to just leave it as it is.

[PaxArcana]

2 hours ago, Epsilon Assassin said:

So what's the reason behind nerfing Hasten besides arbitrarily nerfing it because it's good?

When something has synergy with the rest of a character's powers that is so good, that it is treated by nearly the entire playerbase as required-or-else-you-are-gimped ... then either it is too good, or the rest of the game isn't good enough.  Usually it is the former, and not the latter.

 

2 hours ago, Epsilon Assassin said:

Travel powers are taken by almost everyone as well. Nerf them too. Oh and Fitness is basically required, so nerf that. 

With regard to travel powers, first: they have no real synergy with anything except themselves.  Second: they were adjusted and nerfed back on Live ("combat suppression"), specifically to eliminate what little synergy they had with combat powers.

 

As for Fitness, the devs carefully datamined for months, examining why players were taking Fitness.  And the reason was, because everything else in the game was costing just that little bit too much Endurance to use; Stamina was seen by the players as needed, not because "or you're gimped", but because, "or you'll be using Rest all the time instead of actually playing, and that's no fun".  Picking up Health and either Swift or Hurdle was just a matter of "well since I've got to unlock the pool anyway, why not?"

 

---

 

1 hour ago, Steampunkette said:

Oh, no. This isn't about what I want, @QuiJon. You're guessing at my motives and missing wildly.

It's a fallacy called "Bulverism" - where the person assumes their opponent in a debate is wrong, and then sets about trying to explain WHY they are wrong.

 

Instead of, as they should do, first explain that their opponent is wrong, in the first place.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulverism

 

---

---

 

So, now I have an alternate suggestion, that is a sort of "hybrid" thing.

 

Let us split Hasten's effects into both an Autopower, and a Click power.  Give the Autopower the 20% global recharge.  Give the Click power another 60%.

 

That's actually a buff, albeit a small one.

 

BUT ... the click version?  Instead of a base 300sec recharge, it goes to, say, 450sec.  Just long enough, no-one can PERMA it anymore ... but you can still have it up more often than not.  And when it is up, it'll be worth slightly more than before.  Simultaneously, when it's down, it won't be worth nothing anymore.

[Rathulfr]

8 minutes ago, Vanden said:

To people saying Hasten feels mandatory... how much have you really tried playing without it? I have 8 level 50 characters and only 3 of them took Hasten. I don't miss it on the ones that lack it.

Let's see, I started with I2 back in 2004, played literally hundreds of alts until 2012, then have played at least 50 or so new/recycled characters since the Homecoming launch in April (I was on Bree before it was nuked, then on Torchbearer, then moved to Indomitable when it opened to avoid the queues, before it became the PvP server), so...

 

YES, I've really tried playing without Hasten. 

 

I must admit that I have been able to "wean" myself off of Hasten on many of my builds, but no, not all of them.  There are some that could be fine with just 20% more recharge so that I could drop Hasten entirely.  And there are others that will keep Hasten forever.

[Moka]

I'm pretty sick of the mentality of "X thing is good so we should nerf it/remove it" that people have in this game.

Edited September 25, 2019 by Moka

[Steampunkette]

Some really great points have been raised in the last half page. I still feel like it being that OVERWHELMINGLY POPULAR is a problem. It shows that all the other options are vastly inferior by comparison, mostly because it is a globally-affecting power which no other powerset can provide.

 

And -creating- globally affecting powers in multiple power pools isn't an option, either, since it would exacerbate the issue, not fix it in any meaningful way.

 

So how about this as a different form of compromise:

 

25% Global Recharge for everyone. 25% Global Recharge from Hasten. Hasten's cooldown is reduced from 450 seconds down to 200 seconds, making it easily "Permable" with 2-slotted IOs. Allow it to stack with itself. With heavy set-slotting you could "Double Stack" Hasten permanently, resulting in a net 5% increase over current Permahasten.

 

However with the 25% baseline recharge rate increase, perhaps Hasten won't be quite so attractive.

[ShardWarrior]

2 minutes ago, Steampunkette said:

I still feel like it being that OVERWHELMINGLY POPULAR is a problem.

The graphs showed Fire/Spines brutes being overwhelmingly popular too.  Same with Empathy Defenders.  Should those get nerfed next?

[Rathulfr]

9 minutes ago, Replacement said:

No other AT has this level of "you're expected to underperform until you properly invest in set bonuses, procs, and burn a pool selection."

 

It's not just Dominators.  I think the whole philosophy described by the highlight phrase is the problem we're trying to tackle here, which applies to all ATs -- and some more than others.  Forcing players to "LOL GIT GUD" with IO set bonuses and (almost) mandatory power picks just isn't fun, for anyone that feels forced into that position.

[SlimPickens]

what a terrible idea.

[biostem]

2 minutes ago, ShardWarrior said:

The graphs showed Fire/Spines brutes being overwhelmingly popular too.  Same with Empathy Defenders.  Should those get nerfed next?

Strawman;  Not every AT can take fire or spines powers, and other sets perform as good or better.  Tell me what other power pool pick provides the same kind of global/overarching benefit to a character as hasten?

[Steampunkette]

1 minute ago, ShardWarrior said:

The graphs showed Fire/Spines brutes being overwhelmingly popular too.  Same with Empathy Defenders.  Should those get nerfed next?

Empath Defenders are popular because people like the narrative and mechanical function of healers.

 

Hasten is popular because it's a powerful globally affecting buff.

 

If you cannot see the difference between these two things I'm not certain I can help you. Stop being obtuse.

[Moka]

Just now, biostem said:

Strawman;  Not every AT can take fire or spines powers, and other sets perform as good or better.  Tell me what other power pool pick provides the same kind of global/overarching benefit to a character as hasten?

Tough/Weave. 

[Haijinx]

This would have probably been a reasonable balance suggestion 20 issues ago.

 

At this point, my reaction was, "Really? Why?"

 

There is no reason for this nerf, Everyone has access to hasten.  Even Kheldians.  

 

 

 

[Replacement]

2 minutes ago, ShardWarrior said:

The graphs showed Fire/Spines brutes being overwhelmingly popular too.  Same with Empathy Defenders.  Should those get nerfed next?

I... think you know very well that's not an accurate comparison.  Particularly the Empathy Defenders.

Hasten isn't a power you take because it's part of your fiction.  Hasten isn't specific to one AT or power set.  Everyone can take it, and more importantly, everyone does take it.

 

I think if Homecoming staff held a serious poll and said "if you vote yes, we really will replace hasten with a free passive +recharge bonus"... I would hesitate.  I don't know which way to swing on this.  But be honest with yourself.

 

Also, I would have nerfed spines/fire 12 years ago.

[Rathulfr]

18 minutes ago, Heraclea said:

Let's see no more nerf-herding.  Please.

 

I don't think that @Steampunkette is nerf-herding.  Her OP presents a case for replacing one power that's nearly universal with a global buff that's genuinely universal.  It might have been rough around the edges, and might require a bit of tweaking, but ultimately, there's no net nerf there.

 

[biostem]

1 minute ago, Moka said:

Tough/Weave. 

Which you can't take unless you take punch or kick first, and isn't nearly as useful for every AT.

[Moka]

1 minute ago, biostem said:

Which you can't take unless you take punch or kick first, and isn't nearly as useful for every AT.

And I still take it on pretty much all my characters. Boxing/Kick are just wasted power slots for Tough/Weave. While it may not be beneficial to something like an invulnerability tanker, hasten isn't that beneficial to something like a willpower character.

[ShardWarrior]

4 minutes ago, biostem said:

Strawman;  Not every AT can take fire or spines powers, and other sets perform as good or better.  Tell me what other power pool pick provides the same kind of global/overarching benefit to a character as hasten?

Vengeance

 

[Rathulfr]

13 minutes ago, PaxArcana said:

When something has synergy with the rest of a character's powers that is so good, that it is treated by nearly the entire playerbase as required-or-else-you-are-gimped ... then either it is too good, or the rest of the game isn't good enough.  Usually it is the former, and not the latter.

Bingo.

[Steampunkette]

Just now, ShardWarrior said:

Vengeance

 

Requires 2 other power picks and a corpse. It also doesn't make all of your other powers more effective, it just grants a buff.

 

Just leave, ShardWarrior, if you're not going to actually contribute to the conversation.

[Replacement]

One thing's for sure: I really want more power pools.  I can't help but think the reason Hasten is picked so much is because we only have 10 pools, and functionally, we only have 7-8 (because most "travel" selections are nearly mutually exclusive -- characters with flight don't typically dip into leaping).

 

If we added another 4 pools to the mix, with varying effects, maybe we'd break that reliance on Hasten (which I have frequently grabbed solely because "I couldn't think of anything better").